Word: veblenism
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Perhaps because he never knew his father, Mumford collected a number of tempestuous mentors, including Economist Thorstein Veblen ("a strange combination of the austere, seemingly superobjective scholar and a passionate, willful human being"), Critic Van Wyck Brooks and, above all, Patrick Geddes, the Scottish social theorist recognized as the father of town planning. Geddes later drove his student away by insisting that Mumford turn his teacher's brilliant but chaotic mental processes into limpid prose. But Mumford never repudiated what Geddes stood for: "The regional outlook, the urban focus, the unification of all the dispersed and dissociated aspects...
...perceptive." This is not hard to believe In fact, throughout the book. Kiesling seems to be trying a little too hard, to prove his intellectualism, as if he were saying. "I did so deserve to get in." He manages to intellectualize the sport as he quotes Freud, Jung, Thorsten Veblen, Werner Jaeger and Aristotle in defense of sweat...
...Brooks pushed the denim saga one more chapter, he might have come up with Thorstein Veblen jeans, preferably worn with a vicuna sweatshirt at a Rodeo Drive block party to benefit striking grape pickers. Such scenes belong to theatrical rather than routine life, though today the distinction is often blurred. Star-struck by the endless celebrity parade, a growing number of ordinary people stage self-dramatizations in public places. But are the pseudo John Travolta, roller-discoing among the pedestrians, and the orthodontist attending the U.S. Open dressed like Bjorn Borg intentionally ironic or deadly serious...
...question is too psychologically layered to be answered by Veblen's mechanistic theories. Brooks suggests that the parodic style of showing off is purest at society's extremes. There is the avant-garde's Warholian art and minority put-ons of majority classes, like black mockery of white manners...
...manners whose term "radical chic" is used without attribution. At its best, Showing Off in America is provocative enough to get readers thinking of themselves as social beings after a decade of bestselling ego-lit. At its worst, the book succumbs to irony as an unwitting parody of Veblen's sociology. - By R.Z. Sheppard...